Dirges of the Angel
by Lalieth
Summary: What does immortality do to a person? Short ficlet. COMPLETE.
1. Chapter 1

Funny thing, time—relentless and undetected, all that death and destruction, and everything just kept going—the implacable ticking of time. Authorities insisted there had never been a "humanoid typhoon", or "plants", or a "July", and that the "lost technology" was a fairy tale. In some forgotten village there was a dark-haired man tied to a stake in a pen that some charitable souls kept for him. He had been put there ever since the day he burst into town raving that "she" had been for nothing and that they were trying to cover it all up and that every single blasted day was Tuesday.

When the local sheriff tried to talk some sense into him, he only responded with: "I died on the shores of Demetri" and to any question his answer was a marvel of incomprehension, so the patient man abandoned him to his fate. After that, they kept him in the yard. They tried to erect a shelter for him but he seemed completely insensible to climate. He had the forlorn look of an emaciated animal in the rain. He ate whatever they gave him and in the end seemed so harmless and helpless that they untied him. It mattered not because he never left the spot by his little shed.

On one occasion he was observed to speak to someone, but the other participant in the conversation was not visible to anyone else. They only heard him shout: "Nicholas! You've come so far!"

Not long after that, a mysterious man arrived, a rambler whose feet seemed to be unsure of the actuality of the ground. He was dressed in a simple black suit and carried a little black book with golden keys in which was written all the holy days and the names of the saints. When they inquired of his origin he simply said "I descended from one of them." Perplexed, they asked him why he had come there. His answer to this was just as enigmatic.

"I have come for the dirges of the angel."

The next day, the man in the tattered red coat died in his pen. It was of no real consequence except that the pen was suddenly imbued with the aroma of gunpowder which would never go away even when it was coated with lye. Out in the streets a soft shower of red geraniums fell all day and all that night so that housewives were exhausted from sweeping them off the stoops in bucketfuls and dogs had to be brought in so that they would not be suffocated in their sleep. They could not bury the body because no sooner did they touch it that it seemed to disintegrate like sand and where he had laid there was only a pile of grimy, damp feathers mixed in with the red geraniums.


	2. Chapter 2

For all the beautiful damage, he was still immobilized in an infantile struggle that had its origins in the abyss. When he saw her standing forlornly in the window, he understood immediately that she had traversed time and space simply to love him and he was overcome by an unbearable burden of hate. When he found her by the sink trying to plug interminable wounds with wet towels he shouted with his paltry spirit: "You go to hell! Do you think I can't get rid of you again?"

His place had suddenly become alive again, alive with death, for its halls and rooms were infested with phantoms. He could hear the footsteps of Monev, heavy with unfulfilled vengeance. He could hear the pathetic wheezing of Caine who seemed to age even in the grave. Midvalley's silly horn drifted through the hallways like a sacred mantra. He would awake at night to see the priest levitating by his bedside, apparently out of boredom. Sometimes when he turned too quickly it was as if he cut off the giggling and chattering of young women, one who would always add hastily: "it's full of mercy." Eventually, he could not go near the sink because the aroma of geraniums would smother him—so he simply left piles of towels all over the bathroom.

He frequently mumbled to himself that he could just as well abandon this house of spirits, but the truth was he never made any effort to do so. He rehearsed the daily habits of his life among the wheezing, the stomping, the chanting, the music, and the twisting of forgotten and long accepted solitude. All the while, his immortality worked through his brain like a termite. What Knives did not know (could not know in his final stages) was that his twin was dying of the same parasite in a pen in some forgotten village on the edge of the world. On that very morning he tried to get to the sink again, just for something to toy with, and she reached to hand him a white feather. Unable to believe something substantial could be taken from the dead, he only stared down at it. It remained matted to the curve inside the sink by a smudge of blood . When he picked it up and turned it between his fingers, his last expression was: "Aren't you the clever one?"

Knives was so lighthearted about letting it all go that he actually waved goodbye at his decaying wormhole and the ghosts that were nearly decimated by decrepitude—as he rose among the showering red geraniums to succumb to his ultimate fate in the spinning galaxies and twirling suns of forever. Maybe the exequies of two angels went unnoticed among man, but that was because races condemned for squandering their graces did not get a second chance.


End file.
